As a publicly known reference, there may be cited Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 59-30263 a device disclosed in which comprises a wide stocker in which a lot of thin cartridges including disks therein are accommodated side by side, being stood vertically and lined in the width direction of the stocker, a stocker conveying means which conveys the stocker horizontally in the width direction of the stocker, a draw mechanism which comprises a pair of upper and lower pawls and is arranged in front of the stocker, and a player arranged by a side of the draw mechanism.
As the stocker is horizontally moved by the stocker conveying means, the pair of pawls are relatively moved within a pair of grooves which are formed in the upper and lower sides of one end portion of each cartridge, so that an appointed cartridge is selected from among the many cartridges. The selected cartridge is then drawn forward from the stocker by the pair of pawls of the draw mechanism as soon as the stocker is stopped in an appointed position. The cartridge is thereafter fed to the player in which information is inserted in or extracted from the disk enclosed in the cartridge.
However, the above device possesses several defects as mentioned below.
(A) As the stocker is horizontally moved in order to select the appointed cartridge, a space twice as large as the width of the stocker becomes necessary for the movement of the stocker. Hence, the space is used very needlessly.
(B) The stocker in which a lot of cartridges are accommodated is very heavy, so that the stocker conveying means must be constructed on a large scale. Thus, the whole device becomes not only large and heavy but also expensive.
(C) On account of the heavy stocker, the stocker can not be rapidly moved, so that it can not be possible to select the appointed cartridge on high speed, too. Thus, it is difficult to extract information successively on high speed from the disks in the cartridges.
(D) As the stocker is moved by the stocker conveying means, so that size and weight of the stocker are restricted in view of its conveying speed and strength. The number of accommodated cartridges is, therefore, 20 to 30 at most and will not reach 50 to 100, so that the device is not suitable for dealing with a large amount of information.
(E) The stocker is horizontally moved so as to select the appointed cartridge, so that it is difficult to perform preparatory operations, such as selecting, drawing and standing-by operations on the next appointed cartridge for extracting information successively from the disk in the next appointed cartridge while information is extracted by the player from the preceding disk. Because the position of the stocker relative to the draw mechanism is changed if the stocker is moved after the disk is fed to the player, it is impossible to return the cartridge on the player to the original position in the stocker after the extraction is over.
Thus, it takes too much time to replace the preceding disk on the player with the next one, so that successive high-speed extraction of information becomes impossible.